The Digital Marketing Blog

Do Today’s Media Employees Need Formal Training in Social Media and Digital Marketing?

The San Francisco Chronicle will now require all staff to undergo two months of intense training in digital and social media marketing.

The innovative focus on social media and online marketing is sparking widespread conversion and consideration across the business world today.

Mashable reports that SF Chronicle’s program is designed to encourage reporters to take risks and think “digital first.” But this digital prep-work is critically important for employees across myriad fields, not just journalism. And many are taking cues from the SF Chronicle’s lead.

The publication, one of the country’s oldest media outlets, recently hired Audrey Cooper as the first female managing editor since its inception. Cooper will be spearheading the effort to make SF Chronicle staffers the most digital marketing-savvy professionals working in any industry.

“The approach is novel for newspapers,” Cooper said. “It physically removes reporters from the traditional newsroom and gives them new digital metrics, such as engagement time, to judge whether their stories have reached our core audience. We also plan to use real-time monitoring of the clicks we get from social media and other referral sites, including LinkedIn, Pinterest and Reddit.”

The move hopes to revive the newspaper’s flailing readership, which currently has fallen beneath a circulation of 300,000.